A 72-year-old former crop-duster was sentenced Friday in Jackson, Miss., to three life terms in prison for his role in the 1964 killings of two black teenagers.

James Ford Seale, who prosecutors said was a Ku Klux Klansman, had been convicted in June on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-olds who disappeared while hitchhiking in Mississippi.

“Justice itself is ageless,” U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate said before sentencing Seale, reported the Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson.

Moore and Dee disappeared from Frankin County on May 2, 1964. Two months later, their bodies were discovered in the backwaters of the Mississippi River during a high-profile search for three missing civil rights workers. Moore and Dee’s case received scant media attention compared to the civil rights workers’ case, but the FBI proceeded with an investigation, nonetheless, arresting Seale and another man, Charles Edwards, in November 1964.

Local authorities, however, never prosecuted the case.

When the case came to trial this year, Edwards, an admitted Klansman, was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. He testified that Seale and other Klansmen abducted the teens, tied them to trees and beat them.

They then attached weights to the young men’s bodies and dumped them into the river while they were still alive.

It was the 23rd case from the civil rights era that has been prosecuted since 1989, when federal authorities opened the 1963 murder of Mississipi’s first-ever NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers. The 1964 killings of the three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — was another of those prosecuted. Edgar Ray Killen was convicted in 2005 of manslaughter in the deaths of the three.

Investigations into about 100 civil rights era cases from the South have been reopened in recent years by federal and state officials.

(Optional add end)

A bill that would set up a cold case unit with the Justice Department to pursue unresolved cases from the era stalled in Congress earlier this year.

At a news conference in Jackson after Seale’s sentencing, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Wan Kim of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said the department would not wait for the bill to pass before investigating such cases.

U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who opened the case against Seale, said he felt privileged to pursue justice on behalf of Moore and Dee’s families, particularly when it came so many decades after the murders.

“It’s one thing for Mississippi to say we changed, and its another thing to prove it,” he said. “These men were brutally and sadistically murdered for no reason and, finally, after 43 years, their relatives have closure and justice. Times in Mississippi have changed.”

Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived.